ESTADOS GENERALES
Mauricio Freyre
Peru, Spain,  2025,  Color,  76’ 

Festivals


Festival international de 
cinéma de Marseille FIDMarseille
Compétition Premier Film
Première Mondiale



International Documentary 
Film Festival Amsterdam IDFA
Paradocs
Dead Angle: Institutions



Ji.hlava IDFF
Testimonies competition


Rencontres internationales
du documentaire de Montreal RIDM
New Visions competition



Muestra Internacional 
Documental de Bogotá MIDBO
Conjeturas de lo efimero

 A few seeds preserved in Madrid’s Botanical Gardens are sent back to the south coast of Peru, where they were collected centuries ago. A sensual imaginary journey, a counter-narrative to colonial despoilment.
Since the colonial system, different polymorphous regimes of power extend and feed each other: colonialism, European modernity, anthropocentrism and Western technoscience. The film is conceived as a counter-narrative that explores the spectral capacity of the archive, offering a critical perspective to examine the continuity of contemporary neocolonial structures.



Stills















Estados generales, film stills, 16 mm transferred to digital video, 2025. 



Interviews & Articles



“Estados Generales opens with a sensual kiss exchanged in the midst of lush vegetation in Madrid’s Botanical Garden. Besides plants and trees from Europe, America and the Pacific, the garden also holds archives of scientific expeditions to former colonies, drawings and herbariums, some of them containing unidentified and uncatalogued specimens, gathered in a mysterious room in the shade of History. This is where Mauricio Freyre chooses a sample of seeds to imagine their journey in reverse, from the colonizing to the colonized country. While during the day, the life of the Garden quietly goes on, at night, two archivists secretly prepare the return trip. Divided into several envelopes, the seeds embark for another continent. Until then fixed, the camera now follows the movement of the waves in the depths of the night, before resting on a beach in Chincha valley, Peru. There, a young woman opens her mail. A guided tour in a museum reminds us of the atrocities of slavery. Then, we come face to face with a nature dominated by man. From pesticide fumigations along clementine fields to the processing of the fruits in a factory in accordance with norms imposed by giant corporations, it appears that the colonial order lives on through capitalism. But even though the film makes this sad observation, it also offers a counter-narrative, at the opposite end of hegemony, that challenges the order of things. Such is the case with the spectral presence, embodied by a mutating subjective camera, that in turn disturbs perception. If night is the place where anything is possible, it is in that moment, at the break of dawn, that the conspiratorial hands of two kids plant one of the seeds that have just come back in the middle of a cornfield. With this tiny gesture, they repair a little of the colonial dispossession and offer the beginning of an answer to the question asked by two botanists on the other continent—can a hundred-year-old seed still germinate?”






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In his inventive debut film, Mauricio Freyre intertwines an imaginary journey home with conversations with archive experts from the botanical garden in Madrid. The subject here is seeds—more specifically, seeds taken from former Spanish colonies. Some of them can no longer be identified, but as state property the seeds cannot be discarded. They end up being stored in room S.59, in possibly original 18th- and 19th-century crates marked Frutos sin nombres (“Unnamed fruits”).

In the first half of Estados Generales, Freyre’s 16mm camera explores this archive in tightly framed shots, accompanied by a carefully crafted, minimalist sound design. Then we arrive across the ocean in Chincha Valley, Peru, where Freyre imagines a few seeds returning from Spain to their place of origin.

But this homecoming is not a return to paradise. While nocturnal scenes seem to be captured by the gaze of a wandering ghost, we experience how colonialism continues in South America through a form of capitalism that is just as destructive.


The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam



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Le second âge est moins l’opposé du premier qu’il en procède historiquement pour en adapter la logique. Dans cette nouvelle ère, la classification et l’accumulation primitive ont déjà eu lieu : l’époque est à la modification génétique, aux croisements et au brevetage des espèces de mandarines pour l’agrément des consommateurs internationaux. Dans l’usine, la hiérarchie néocoloniale recoupe la morphologie des fruits : pas de graines pour l’Europe, seulement une chair immaculée, tandis que le marché chinois tolère encore les imperfections. De même, la chasse aux esclaves rebelles, racontée par la voix off d’un guide, n’est plus que de l’histoire ancienne, tant la domination des multinationales implantées au Pérou s’affirme sans limite sur les travailleuses paupérisées. De ce point de vue, le film de Freyre dialogue avec les films de l’industrie alimentaire d’après la robotisation du Catalan Gerard Ortín Castellví (Agrilogistics, 2022 ; Bliss Point, 2024) ou avec ceux que Lukas Marxt a consacrés au travail agricole des sans-papiers mexicains en Californie (Imperial Valley, 2018 ; Valley Pride, 2023).

Estados Generales se tient donc à mi-chemin entre l’inventaire général du patrimoine botanique colonial et la convocation d’états généraux des peuples colonisés et de leur territoire – moins imaginés sur le modèle d’un « parlement des vivants » latourien que sur la base d’un décolonialisme radical (quoique non dénué d’un certain romantisme vitaliste). C’est sans doute ainsi qu’il faudrait comprendre le « départ de fiction » qui articule les deux espaces et qui imagine la fable d’une refécondation de la terre par un couple aperçu fugacement à plusieurs moments du film. Dans les derniers plans, une main récupère l’échantillon d’une graine momifiée (rappelant l’installation du cinéaste de 2023, Ghost Seed, issue du travail sur le même fonds d’archives) qu’un plan de la première partie lui avait envoyé. En l’enfouissant dans la terre avec un peu d’humidité, le film s’achève avec l’espoir de la voir refleurir sur la terre spoliée.



Revue Débordements

B. S.

Link to the full article at debordements.fr





FUNDAMENTAL ERRORS
Mauricio Freyre 
Peru, Spain,  On production

With the support of

MNCARS Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
 L’Internationale
Museum of the Commons
Ministerio de Cultura de España, Ayudas para la producción e investigación artística

 ‘Fundamental Errors’ is a film installation that explores how fictions, omissions, and distortions have shaped Western natural and scientific history by tracing four foundational narratives of an Andean tree that unknowingly molded global geopolitics. Through the genealogy of the quina (cinchona) tree, a species native to the Andes once exploited as a colonial weapon for its anti-malarial bark  the installation examines how a plant became a strategic resource for imperial armies, enabling European expansion across tropical territories in Asia and Africa. Its use persisted until World War II, when synthetic substitutes replaced it.

Combining diaries, travel notes, fables, and testimonies spanning four centuries (1663, 1798, 1857, 1952), the project weaves together  a ¹ condesa miraculously cured of malaria in Lima; a ² Shuar man transformed into a jaguar devouring a colonial soldier; a ³ Bolivian watercolorist traveling with an English trader of alpacas and quina; and an ⁴ encounter between an Amazonian community and a U.S. botanist during the largest search for a medicinal plant in history. These narratives intertwine with fragments from the artist’s own research, which began with unclassified botanical archives at Madrid’s Royal Botanical Garden and extend to contemporary testimonies from Kañari (Peru), one of the quina tree’s last habitats, now threatened by copper mining.

Conceived as a scenario rather than a fixed form, the installation unfolds as a stage set, a backdrop where a triptych of off-screen voices interlaces historical and contemporary fragments around the quina tree. Foundational texts, archival traces, and field notes converge with a present-day voice that speaks from lived experience. Their narrative spans from seventeenth-century writings to contemporary testimonies, ultimately closing with those of the Kañari community in Lambayeque, one of the last remainiang habitats of the cinchona. 

Presented as a single-channel film or a multi-screen installation, the work can be activated through live performance and an accompanying soundtrack in which readers, voices, synchronized lighting, and sound intervene. The projected images operate as short loops, generating visual rhythms in dialogue with the spoken word and the soundtrack. These images draw from diverse sources, including the documentation of research journeys and refilmed archival material of varied nature.



¹ Bado, Sebastiano. Anastasis Corticis Peruviae, seu Chinachinae defensio. Genuae, (1663), Caput II, Liber I, pp. 22–24. 

² Humboldt, Alexander von. Tagebücher der Amerikanischen Reise VI (1798–1805), p. 148r. Manuscrito original. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, MS germ. quart. 298. 

³ Savage, Santiago (1857-1858). Series 01: Annotated watercolour sketches by Santiago Savage. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. 

⁴ Camp, W. H. (1952). Plant hunting in Ecuador. Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden, 8(1), 1–84.

Installation, single or multiscreen projection, 
with sound
16mm transferred to digital video (DCP),  1.85:1, Color, with sound in stereo
29 min in loop




The project originated as a reading and writing group held at the Museo Reina Sofía, bringing together scientists, historians, writers, and activists to reflect on the intersections of nature, colonial history, and fiction. Participants in the group and collaborators on the project included, among others:

-Nataly Allasi Canales
Evolutionary biologist at Kew Gardens, Indigenous rights activist

-Nicolás Cuvi
Biologist and historian, epistemologies of the South, FLACSO Ecuador

-Alejandro Gómez Silvera
Forest engineer, INIA Perú

-Tilsa Otta
Experimental writer, poet, and artist

-Emanuele Fabiano
Anthropologist, specialist in Indigenous cosmologies and extractivism, EHESS

-Saló
Musician, DJ, producer, activist, and Peruvian cultural manager

-Laura Pacas
Actress, director, theater as a tool for social transformation
















Documentation of Fundamental Errors in Early History (performance) and Limpia con huevo / Mal de ojo (film, 2025), Mauricio Freyre, Crudo #1, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, June 5, 2025.